


and we wear out all our prayers

by emery_and_lead



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Elements of Comics Canon, Family, Fix-It, Funerals, Grief/Mourning, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, M/M, Mentions of past child abuse, Post-Season/Series 02, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, foggy is a theater kid at heart, sort of Karen/Frank
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:42:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9074437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emery_and_lead/pseuds/emery_and_lead
Summary: “Why does your mom think I’m an alcoholic?”There’s a long beat of silence over the line, then Foggy says, “Oh. She was dumping your scotch into the plant. That whole scene makes a lot more sense now.” Something happens just beyond the range of what the speakers can pick up, and Matt hears Foggy stumble a little. “Son of a—hold on.” His voice goes muffled and distant, like he’s holding the phone against his chest. “Erica, come pick up your Legos!”Little feet stomp against the floor on Foggy’s end, and then Erica’s voice comes into range. “Is that Matt?” The words start out louder and recede as she crouches to grab what must be the blocks Foggy stepped on.“Yeah, babe,” says Foggy, distracted. “Don’t leave them in the kitchen again, okay?” She must nod, because when Foggy speaks again his voice comes clear into the speaker. “Sorry,” he tells Matt. He doesn’t really sound it. *Foggy’s sister dies on a Thursday. Juggling his new job and his young niece and his grief, Foggy’s struggling to keep his world from spinning apart under his feet. Matt wants to help, but they don’t talk anymore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At first I was like “oh I’ll name Foggy’s niece Erica, it’ll be a fun little nod to 2099 A.D. Genesis, an Easter egg, great idea,” but then it mutated into a whole 2099-based plot because I have approximately no self control. Foggy’s family in this fic isn’t very much like it is in the comics, but I kept his parents’ and Candace’s names, because why not. Also, I have a complete inability to write non-angsty kid fic so, be warned.
> 
> Heed the tags for warnings. There is no actual alcoholism in this story, but parallels are made. There is vague reference to drugs having been used in the past, but it's mostly that "one doobie" Foggy smoked so.
> 
> Title from Dessa’s The Beekeeper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you get confused about Foggy's family, I've added a guide to the post-chapter notes.

It takes fifteen minutes to get a drop time out of the guy running dock security detail, the numbers knocked free only after Matt’s punched out more than three dozen swears and twice as many promises of bloody retribution. Gunrunners always seem to have an overdeveloped sense of drama. The guard broke off just when Matt thought they were getting somewhere to spit a mouthful of blood in his face. He can feel it there still, each drop distinct, a constellation of garish freckles across one cheek and the bridge of his nose. The smell of old iron on his skin makes him feel like he’s rusting.

It’s late when Matt finally hears the sirens split off from the tangled burst of noise that throbs white-hot at the Kitchen’s center. Three cop cars are heading his way. He waits until they circle the scene and the wailing hits him uninterrupted, no buildings or cargo containers to break the waves, before backing away and clearing this rooftop for the next.

Matt hears Foggy crying in his apartment from across Hell’s Kitchen and he doesn’t know why. He dropped to street level two blocks back, and the sound drifts down from the third story like a voice from on high, like divine sorrow: something he isn’t meant to know, those gates closed to him now.

Matt changes course and goes to crouch on Foggy’s fire escape, cleaning up a mugger on the way. He feels like a feral cat, waiting for the things Foggy drops, his hunger stronger than his pride.

One hour and twenty minutes into his secret vigil, Foggy’s mother calls. Matt listens to her tinny voice shake through three degrees of separation.

“You’ve heard?” Anna says, words ringing through the speaker, in Matt’s helmet, across the distance in between. “I can’t believe it. God, I can’t—” she stops. Sobs once, like a gunshot down the line. Matt’s stomach drops.

“Yeah,” says Foggy, “I heard,” and Matt can hear his voice ring in his chest like an echo through an empty hall. “What happened?”

She explains, in fits and starts like halting footsteps. A home invasion robbery gone wrong. House ransacked. Valuables missing. Lori dead on the floor.

Foggy’s crying again.

“ _Oh, Foggy_ ,” says Foggy’s mom. They talk for a few more minutes, Anna’s voice wet and Foggy’s too dry, the way it gets as he’s tearing up, and when they hang up Foggy cries harder.

Matt makes himself stay and listen, presses the roughness of brick into his forehead, his palm. Each sob trembles with the resonance of Foggy’s windowpane, and it makes Matt think of the stained-glass angels bowing their heads over the altar in the church he went to as a child before his dad died, the church he has returned to now. When it was raining and the grey overcast light was filtering through and Matt could still see, it looked like they were crying.

He’s not sure why that image comes to mind. The pain of someone he couldn’t touch, someone beautiful and distant; the connection of glass and sorrow.

_Oh, Foggy._

The next night Anna Nelson leaves a message on Matt’s voicemail telling him what happened. Her voice is grave but controlled now, a tremor over Lori’s name quickly reined in. At the end she tells him the funeral’s on Wednesday, to give Foggy’s oldest sister Maura and her husband Ron time to get back from Nicaragua. Matt programs an alarm into his phone. He wavers for several minutes over what to call it and finally settles on Lori’s name, repeated over and over like a ringtone: like she’s calling him.

When it goes off Wednesday morning he can hear the stutter in his own heart. He breathes through it, checks his bandaged ribs with careful fingers, and dresses in his best court clothes. It’s the first time he’s touched them in months.

Ten o’clock finds him in the graveyard. Although Matt felt the displaced air when Foggy’s mom looked back at him, heard her question hissed at Foggy, he keeps to the back and listens.

All funerals share a certain sound, the preacher’s voice refracted at sharp angles by a rectangular grave, the strange muffled echo of a hole in soft ground. Matt can hear Foggy’s heartbeat strong and steady. By the way his pulse is doubled and the subtle crumbling of dirt beneath his feet, he’s standing with his toes at the lip of the grave like a man on the edge of a cliff.

Another heartbeat flutters at Foggy’s elbow, waist-high and rabbit-quick. It’s distorted, the miniature Doppler effect of a heart in motion. The shift of her satin dress over her shoulder blades and under Foggy’s hand on her back matches the movement of her heart. It jumps around like the warm pinpoint of a laser-sighted rifle in shaking hands and beats like a countdown towards tragedy.

The roving heartbeat and the slick sound of satin and the rush of blood, always quicker through a small body, coalesce into Erica fidgeting at the edge of her mother’s grave. Her hair slips over her shoulders with a sound like running water. She’s not crying now, but she smells like tears.

Foggy nudges her between the shoulder blades, a quick staccato tap, and they both drop their flowers into the grave at the same time. Matt feels the air displaced, hears them collide with the casket lid, and catches the sweet chlorophyll scent of bruised petals. They stand there a moment longer, looking down into the grave, their breath echoing back to brush their faces, though Matt doubts they can feel it. Then Foggy leads her away by the hand.

Matt has heard Erica’s voice ring from Foggy’s apartment while on patrol the last few nights, and though he hadn’t thought to wonder if the arrangement was permanent, it makes sense. Foggy’s parents are getting older, and Maura likes her nieces and nephews best on the other side of a Skype call. Angie has too many children of her own. Candace is practically a child herself.

Matt is distracted, Angie’s husband whispering prayers to his left and Foggy’s heartbeat never as close as it seems. He doesn’t hear Anna coming until she touches his elbow.

She presses a flower into his hand and leads him to the grave so he can drop it in. He says a short prayer of safe passage and crosses himself. The flower tumbles down with a short burst of air, a soft thump, and a smell that lingers.

Foggy’s mom squeezes his hand. Then she lets him go.

Matt wanders back to the periphery of the congregation. The periphery of Foggy’s life. And yet Foggy’s heartbeat sounds so close, still. It follows him. Or maybe it’s already there wherever he goes, waiting.

Or perhaps they’ve been together so long it’s Matt’s own heart he’s hearing, alone, echoed in his head and matched to Foggy’s beat.

“Hi Matt.”

Matt tips his head down. He smiles. “Hi, Erica.”

She’s taller than she was last time he saw her, her voice closer and its angle slightly less acute than it was last Nelson Family Christmas Party, more than a year ago now. This Christmas, Matt hadn’t come, he and Foggy already one month estranged, and Foggy had made Matt’s excuses. Now, two months later, here they are.

Matt lifts his face up to Foggy’s like a flower towards the sun, sightless but familiar, guided by instinct toward its warmth. “She’s coming to live with you?”

Foggy’s hair brushes his shoulder when he shrugs. Just the one, so it’s a crooked shrug. Foggy, who talks with his hands and smiles with his whole body: the heft of one shoulder all he has left for Matt. His hair is still long but he styles it differently now, with a product that smells like hints of sandalwood and clove but mostly like chemicals, too much for Matt’s nose but that’s not a concern, anymore. He hasn’t cut it since he started working at HC&B. “The last thing Mom and Dad need right now is a seven-year-old underfoot,” he says, his voice stiff and distant.

Erica nods. The sound flows like water again as her hair slides across her shoulder blades. She’s still holding Foggy’s hand. “I do like to lie on the floor sometimes,” she says, and by the way her voice resonates, Matt thinks her nose has grown.

“What?” says Foggy. He looks down at her, distracted. There’s a laugh in his voice and a softness in his shoulders, the cold angles melting. Matt can tell Foggy’s doing something with his face, but he doesn’t know what. Scrunching his nose, probably. Foggy doesn’t bother to narrate. “Why?”

Erica’s dress slips over her shoulders. A shrug. “That’s where the sunny spot is.”

Foggy’s still looking at her. Matt thinks they might be trading faces back and forth, Foggy’s mouth open, but he isn’t talking or yawning. His jaw just hangs there. Erica pokes her tongue out. Between the two of them, the relative humidity in the air has risen with the moisture from their breath.

Foggy glances over at Matt and pauses, as though he forgot Matt was there. His hair shifts as he straightens, an avalanche of strands tumbling over each other, and he hunches his shoulders into rigid lines. Matt feels his own shoulders pull tight to mirror them.

Foggy turns back to him. “So, yeah. You know how Maura is about kids, and Angie has enough of them as it is, and Candace isn’t ready, yet. So I guess I was the last man standing.”

“You always were Lori’s favorite,” Matt says.

“Yeah. Well.” Foggy sighs and rubs his face. He sounds tired. The man who just had his tongue lolling out of his mouth is gone now, and Matt’s not sure he knows who replaced him. “Why are you here, Matt?”

Matt feels his face crumple, though he tries to stop it. “Foggy, please. You know I love Lori.”

“Loved.”

“What?”

“Past tense.”

“Foggy, I.” Matt shakes his head. He passes his cane from hand to hand, just for something to do. Stops when he realizes he’s matched it to the cadence of Foggy’s breath. “I can’t believe that.”

Foggy shrugs again. “You go ahead and believe what you want. I don’t want to be evangelized.”

Matt gives him a little half-smile. He hears Foggy’s pulse change, just barely, but Foggy holds himself still and keeps his breathing even, under control. Matt, who has no frame of reference for Foggy when he’s like this, can’t tell what it means. “Maybe you could use a little faith,” Matt says.

Foggy looks up sharply and Matt’s smile slides away. “I _had_ faith,” Foggy says. “In you. In the law.” He shakes his head slowly, hair pushing the air around in fluid sheets. His throat clicks when he swallows, a vulnerable sound, like a door he tries to close that won’t latch all the way. “It never did me any good.”

He tugs on Erica’s hand, and the whorls of his palm catch against hers. It sounds like connection, like family. Like Matt grabbing Foggy’s hand when he’s got the spins, drunk and stumbling, looking for something to hold.

Foggy turns away. “Come on, Erica,” he says.

“Okay.” Her feet rustle the grass as she skips to keep up, and Foggy adjusts his pace so she doesn’t have to, the way he always does, without a thought. “Bye, Matt.” She waves over her shoulder, a riot of displaced air.

“He can’t see you, buddy,” Foggy says, his voice receding as they go.

“Oh, right.” Erica twists as far as she can without letting go of Foggy’s hand. Matt knows from the shift of her dress and the slight stumble in her footsteps, the way her voice carries when she shouts, “I JUST WAVED!” Everyone turns to stare, hair shuffling against their shoulders and the backs of their necks. Matt waves back, purposely aiming a little too far to the left.

By now, everyone’s starting to move toward the cars. The reception is at Foggy’s parents’ house, where they've lived since they moved out to the suburbs, and when Anna insists Matt ride with them he doesn’t know how to refuse. Doesn’t know if he wants to.

It doesn’t matter anyway. With all the Nelson siblings and Angie’s four kids, there are four seats too few. Matt gets shotgun, Carly sits on Madison’s lap, and Jacob shares a seatbelt with Theo.

Foggy takes Erica to get a ride from someone else.

***

Foggy’s mom has been sliding these long, reproachful looks Foggy’s way ever since Matt slunk into the very last pew during the funeral service, like the ugly duckling rejected once more, and Foggy didn’t try to stop him. It’s Foggy’s own fault, he supposes. He hasn’t exactly been keeping her up to date. Still, that look is even more unsettling up close, so he avoids her by meandering around the house with Erica in tow, never standing still for more than a few seconds at a time.

She corners him by the staircase while he’s waiting for Erica to get out of the bathroom. It’s a cheap trick, and he might have accused her of cheating, only that would be impossible. Everyone knows Mom makes the rules. He can’t get away without climbing the dubiously stable railing at his back or vaulting over a potted plant, which is probably not the best idea with Erica’s Sprite in one hand and his own cocktail in the other.

He never should have let Erica get another drink. She obviously can’t hold it.

“Franklin,” says his mom, and Foggy winces. His full name may start with an F and end in a RANKLIN, but from her it only ever spells trouble.

“Hi, Mom.” He tries to pass his untouched drink off on her as an olive branch and maybe also a distraction, but she won’t take it. “You’re not drinking?” he asks. He frowns, feeling sloppy and uncouth and a little ashamed for the three cocktails already under his belt, less than two hours after the casket touched down.

“No,” his mom says. She fiddles with the sleeve of her long black dress. “I’ve heard drowning yourself in shots at a post-funeral reception is bad manners,” she says. Her smile is endlessly sad.

“ _Mom_.” Foggy says the word like he’s choking on it, a name one-fifth less hers than it was five days before.

She waves a hand and Foggy blinks hard until he feels like he can breathe again. “I didn’t come over here for your drink,” she says, back at it with the reproach, and yeah. Foggy was afraid of that.

He sighs. “Can we please just… not do this right now?”

She ignores him, which is pretty much what he expected. “I tell people,” she says, “for all his faults, my Foggy’s a good boy.”

Foggy grimaces. “Mom, please.”

“A good friend,” she continues. “Loyal.”

Erica is taking a really long time in the bathroom. He turns to check and sees that she’s come out, but got caught talking to the Mahoneys halfway between the bathroom door and Foggy. Brett’s crouched down in front of her so they can talk face to face, which would be cute if he wasn’t also hogging Foggy’s ticket out of this conversation.

Then again, he knows Brett’s the one who picked Erica up the day Lori died. He’s smiling at Erica while she talks, but his face is drawn with sadness and worry around the edges, and what’s Foggy supposed to do with that.

Foggy tries to rake a hand through his hair and ends up spilling half of Erica’s drink into the potted plant. The other half skips the detour and falls straight on the floor. “Fuck,” he says, stepping away from the puddle and avoiding his mom’s glare in the same motion to save time. He sets the empty cup down on the edge of the stair behind him and sighs.

It’s hard to meet her eyes, but he does it. He tries not to look as lost as he feels. Considering he feels like a three year old left alone by the teacups at Disney World, it’s a success. He’s pretty sure he makes a solid five-year-old-forgotten-in-the-cereal-isle. Which, he should know, since that actually happened once.

At least he’s not crying this time. Even if he feels like he might. “I couldn’t—he just kept pushing me away.” It sounds like begging when it should sound like cursing.

“And you let him?”

Foggy shakes his head. This time, when he tries to drag his hand through his hair, it goes off without a hitch. The same cannot be said for his breath, which catches in the tears trapped at the back of his throat. He swallows them down and says, “I couldn’t watch him do that to himself.”

Foggy trailed Lori everywhere when they were kids, down the street to the dollar store on the corner, up the stairs to Mr. Litwack’s to play ding dong ditch, out onto the roof of the high school after Lori failed math to throw rocks at stingy Mrs. Steinman every time she passed. But now Lori has gone somewhere Foggy can’t follow.

Foggy can see him sipping his drink just across the room, but Matt has never felt so far away. Foggy knows that’s where Matt’s headed, too, following Lori to that unreachable place out beyond Mr. Litwack’s and the corner store, beyond Nelson and Murdock, beyond Hell’s Kitchen with its heat and its hunger. Beyond Foggy’s reach. Foggy can’t follow Matt to the edge just to watch him jump.

“Oh,” Foggy’s mom says quietly, like a revelation.

A revelation she’s apparently decided not to share.

Erica comes over then, to tug on his sleeve and ask him where her Sprite is. Foggy points to the puddle on the floor and shrugs an apology.

“The plant was thirsty. But that Sprite went right through it.” The last part comes out very pointed. Erica pretends not to notice. She sighs, put-upon, and drags him back to the drinks table. “How are Brett and his mom?” he asks as he pours Sprite into a Dixie cup for her.

She shrugs. “Good.” She downs half her drink in one go. A sputtery little burp comes out her nose like a baby pig snorting, which is pretty gross but also kind of adorable. Foggy resigns himself to another bathroom break looming in his not-too-distant future.

On their next circuit of the room, Foggy spots his mom cornering Matt in the same place by the stairs and feels a rush of vindictive pleasure. He avoids them both, and only lets himself feel a little bad about it.

“Why do you hate Matt now,” Erica asks while they’re standing by the hors d’oeuvres, because sure, why not. It’s Let’s-All-Gang-Up-On-Foggy Day, and she needs a distraction. She must have seen the way Foggy keeps looking over there.

“I don’t hate him,” Foggy tells her, handing her a funeral roll and a couple of cheese cubes, the sharp cheddar ones he knows she likes. “That’s the problem.”

“Oh,” she says, sounding kind of skeptical around the cheese cube in her mouth, which is fair enough.

When Foggy looks again a minute later, Matt’s gone and his mother is dumping a scotch into the potted plant. Which is kind of weird, but he’s not going over there to ask. Maybe she’s forcing the plant to let her live vicariously through it, which is unfortunate for the plant, but Foggy figures she’s allowed to be a little unbalanced right now.

When Foggy and Erica pass into the other room, the picture slideshow has transitioned into a reel of old home videos. They stop to watch Lori toddling along on unsteady legs, bumping into the couch, the chair, the ottoman, getting pushed around in a pink stroller at the Bronx Zoo, holding out the first tooth she ever lost, so close to the camera it’s nothing but a big white blur. Erica steps forward a little, staring up at the screen with wide eyes, its light reflecting back on her face.

A few minutes later it’s progressed to more recent videos: Lori’s wedding, Lori floating on her back in a pool with her baby bump sticking up out of the water, talking to their dad behind the camera. When baby Erica stumbles across the screen, holding onto Lori’s legs while Lori laughs down at her, now-Erica’s hand tightens around Foggy’s.

“Let’s go,” Foggy says softly, trying to steer her away, but she won’t let him.

“No,” she says. “I want to watch.”

So they watch.

“—and I told myself, Lori, it’s been three and a half years. You better switch back to the maiden name now before you make that poor child learn to spell her name twice.”

Up on the screen Maura laughs, larger than life. “Poor Madison. I bet Ange regretted hyphenating for a while there. Madison Abernathy-Nelson, Jesus Christ.”

In the background, just visible behind Lori and Maura, Candace steals the spotlight. It’s her way. “Hey, Fogart,” she says, and a moment later Foggy walks into view.

“Hey Candy Stripper.”

On screen, Maura lowers her drink. “Hey Fog Spawn! Don’t be a misogynistic douchebag! I hear it’s the leading cause of frizz in men!”

Foggy grins behind her. “Oh, so we’re starting with the cheap hair shots right off the bat? Good to know! Nice helmet by the way, you working construction?”

Their mom comes into frame and sighs. “What are we going to do with that boy?”

“We could sell him on the Black Market,” Angie suggests from just off-screen, and the camera swings around and then away so her face swoops momentarily into view.

“Or we can give him to the circus,” Candace calls over, “I hear the clowns like foghorns,” and she pinches on-screen Foggy in the hip to make him laugh once, quick and loud. “Honk, honk.”

Foggy in the video notices the camera and squawks. Foggy in the here and now makes a note never to produce that sound ever again. “Oh my god, Dad, are you _filming_ this?”

In the foreground, Lori laughs. Then the picture shudders, and she’s gone, her laughter replaced by the clicking of the tape. The film’s run out.

***

Erica lives in the city with Uncle Foggy now, but they stop by her house on their way home from the funeral. Uncle Foggy keeps his hands over her eyes all the way through the front room so she doesn’t have to see the bloodstain on the carpet and the bullet holes in the table and the wall. She knows about the blood and the bullet holes because she heard Brett talking about them in the police station when it first happened, after he came to pick her up from school in the middle of Language Arts.

Erica’s not allowed up in the attic because it’s dusty and Mom said there might be s-pestos or something up there. But Uncle Foggy doesn’t know that (and Mom is gone, gone, gone), so when they’re packing up all her things and she tells him she needs to get some stuff from the attic he says okay.

The steps to the attic are in the ceiling of the tiny closet in the back of Mom’s bedroom where no one would ever think to look. With Erica and Uncle Foggy in there together it’s kind of squished. Uncle Foggy’s pretty soft though, and he smells like the dryer, so it’s better than being crammed in with Theo’s elbows and Madison’s bad braces-breath.

Uncle Foggy tumbles the ladder down for her. He keeps his hand braced on her leg the whole way up until she pulls her feet in the trapdoor.

“You good?” he asks, muffled through the ceiling.

She pops her head back out the trapdoor. “Yep.” She looks around then grins down at him. “My floor is your ceiling.”

“Yeah,” he says, more like a little laugh than a word.

“Weird.” She pulls her head back in and stands up and turns on the light. The light’s kind of dim and sad-looking with no cover and a string hanging down, like a yo-yo someone forgot to roll up.

“Okay,” says Uncle Foggy from down below. “Call if you need me.”

The attic really is dusty. Her sneakers leave tracks clear enough to see the patterns on the bottoms. The tufty pink insulation looks like cotton candy, but there was some in the garage once and when Erica tried to fluff it she got three fiberglass splinters in her palm and had to hold her hand still-as-a-statue under the lamp while Mom picked them out, her touches soft and warm. Insulation is _deceptive_. Around her, it pushes out through long cracks in the walls like it’s alive and trapped and trying to get out.

“Stay,” she tells it.

She eyes it suspiciously. It stays where it is.

She nods at it like Mom does when Erica offers to do the vacuuming and doesn’t forget any of the corners or the spot underneath the coffee table, in the way that means _thank you_ and _good job_.

Like Mom _did_.

Erica scrunches her face up like she saw Uncle Foggy doing during the funeral while he was trying not to cry. It doesn’t really work. She wipes her face and turns to the stacks of boxes that fill up the rest of the attic, flinging the flaps open and digging through the ones on top.

She has to stand on her toes to see inside. Being on your tiptoes makes everything more exciting. It feels sneakier that way.

Everything’s boring in the first boxes. She drags them down to the floor and looks in the next ones.

She opens the flap of a box and breathes in hard at what’s on top. It’s Mom’s prom dress. Erica knows it from the picture Grandma has on the mantle in her house, Mom looking beautiful on the front porch in that dress with her hair all done up and a big white flower tied around her wrist. The flower’s in the box, too, in its own little clear plastic coffin at the very bottom, all brown and wrinkled and _dead_. It’s so much smaller, dry and leathery like the shrunken head in Harry Potter, the edges of the petals crumbling away.

The prom dress is still bright and pretty like new, but her eyes blur it into a big yellow blob because she’s crying a little. It’s okay. No one’s here to see.

The dress got unfolded while she was crying all over it and now it won’t fold up the right way, but she tries. She pushes the dust away with her hands and lays the dress gently on the floor next to her. It makes her think of the way they lowered Mom’s box with Mom inside it.

She leaves the flower in the box. It’s already buried.

The next box is boring, and so is the one after that. The third one has an old kazoo in it, and she takes it out and sticks it in her mouth to play while she opens more boxes.

She opens the bottom box in one of the middle stacks and feels her own eyes getting bigger. “Whoa,” she says. “ _Awesome_.”

Inside the box there’s a _space helmet_.

She picks it up and turns it right-side-forward and puts it on. “Houston,” she says, “we have a problem.” It wobbles on her head like a bobble head.

“ _Crrk_. This is Houston,” she says out the side of her mouth. “What’s the problem up there?”

“ _Crrk_. Looks like the sun is about to explode!”

“Jeez! That’s a pretty big problem. What’re you gonna do, Space Captain Erica? _Crrk._ ” The helmet slides down over her eyes. She pushes it back with both hands.

“I think… I think I have to sacrifice myself!”

 _“Crrk_. No! You can’t! We need you down on Earth!”

“Not as much as you need me up here. _Crrk_. Erica out. See you on the other side, boys.”

She restacks some of the heavier boxes and climbs on top of them. She takes off the helmet and uses it to cover up the light bulb.

“The blast has been contained! I’m… running out of… air…”

The box buckles underneath her. She falls down into it, ankle-deep in the baby clothes inside.

The helmet falls to the ground and cracks into a hundred bajillion pieces.

She jumps down out of the box and slaps both hands over the pieces to stop the rattling. A sharp metal bit splits her knuckle and she whispers, “Shit,” because it’s okay to swear if you’re hurting and quiet about it.

Uncle Foggy comes stampeding into the closet like fifty elephants. "Erica?” he calls, up the ladder. She can hear him shuffling his feet at the bottom, like he’s thinking about climbing up.

“I’m okay,” she says quickly.

“Maybe you should come down,” says Uncle Foggy in his worry voice.

“In a minute,” says Erica. She dumps all the pieces of the helmet back into the box. Something crinkles and she leans forward to look inside. There’s a piece of paper tucked into the bottom, caught under the pieces of the helmet.

She takes it out, careful, so she doesn’t cut herself again. The paper’s really old and says her dad’s name at the top in terrible handwriting that looks worse than Erica’s did in preschool.

It’s a note. She whispers the words underneath out loud to herself.

_you owe me_

Mom told Erica her dad was a gambler, and that’s why he left. Erica knows what that is. Whatever her dad owed the note-writer, it probably wasn’t handwriting lessons.

The note is short and easy to remember. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing important enough to keep. She turns it over but there’s nothing on the back except some dots where the pen bled through.

“Erica?” says Uncle Foggy. “You want me to come up, or—”

“No!” she shouts, and shoves the note in the box and slams it shut.

She opens it again and lays her mother’s prom dress carefully over the paper and all the little pieces of the helmet, until she can’t see them at all.

She throws the kazoo in there, too.

“I’m coming,” she calls down.

She carries the box to where Uncle Foggy can see her and he asks, “That it?” When Erica nods he has her pull the ladder back up into the attic and scoot on her butt to the edge of the trapdoor. She drops down, hugging the box to her chest with both arms. Uncle Foggy catches her around the waist and sets her on her feet.

Uncle Foggy tries to take the box but she hugs it tighter. “I wanna carry this one,” she says. Uncle Foggy shrugs and grabs the bags they filled with all her clothes and toys earlier. There’s another bag mixed in with all of Erica’s. She sees the corner of a photo album sticking out where the zipper wouldn’t close and realizes it’s filled with stuff from Mom’s room. Uncle Foggy probably packed it up while she was in the attic.

Uncle Foggy keeps bumping a bag full of Erica’s stuffed animals into her back until he bumps her right on out the door. He lets her carry the box from the attic all the way out to the car, and when they get to Uncle Foggy’s apartment, the new big one he bought with money from his fancy new job without Matt, he lets her carry it all the way inside.

Once all her stuff is in her new room Uncle Foggy makes sandwiches. She tries to help but Uncle Foggy won’t let her.

“Look at your hands, they’re disgusting. You’re like a little baby dust monster,” he says. “Oh my God, is that _blood_?”

It is blood, but it’s mostly dry now. She cut her finger on that little piece of the helmet almost an hour ago. “I think I cut it on the box,” she tells him.

“C’mere, buddy,” says Uncle Foggy, herding her into the bathroom. He twists on the faucet, flips down the toilet cover, and pushes her down to sit on it. The angle’s weird since the sink and the toilet are next to each other, but she lets him shove her hands under the water. She watches it turn pinkish grey from her blood and the dust while Uncle Foggy gets a Batman Band-Aid out from behind the mirror.

He holds her finger like a baby bird and wraps the Band-Aid around it gently. When he looks up into her face he looks more serious than he should over such a little cut.

He checks over his work, cradling Erica’s hand like Mom did when she took out those three splinters. His hands are soft and warm.

“Are you okay?” he asks. It’s still too serious, but suddenly everything feels that way. The whole world is too serious, now.

“Yeah,” says Erica. She’s too serious, too.

“Good,” Uncle Foggy says. “Good.” Like he’s telling the world how to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick guide to the Nelson Family:
> 
> Anna and Edward Nelson  
> Maura  
> Angela “Angie”  
> Lori  
> Franklin “Foggy”  
> Candace
> 
> Angela’s kids:  
> Madison  
> Theo  
> Jacob  
> Carly
> 
> Erica is an only child


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Foggy's mom thinks Matt is an alcoholic and nobody is a rebound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to get the bulk of this out while I'm still on break, so chapter updates will be quick at first and slow down in a couple weeks. This story is going to be a long one. Anyway, hope you like it.

“So yeah,” says Foggy, “it’s kind of permanent.”

Marci purses her lips.

“What?” asks Foggy. He knows that look. It is not a good look.

They’re sitting at the island in his kitchen, which is about a thousand times nicer than the one in his previous apartment. The refrigerator is chrome and fits roughly three times as much food as the last one Foggy had. That beat-up white hand-me-down from his sister Maura and her husband Ron, given to Foggy when they sold their house and started living hand-to-mouth as transcontinental wanderers or whatever, had been one wheeze away from giving up the ghost. When he moved out, Foggy found a new home for it in a nearby dumpster.

This one is brand new and barely makes a sound. The other day Foggy bought five of those word-magnet kits, and he and Erica have already covered the gleaming freezer door with silly sentences and long, rambling stories they constructed by switching off word-for-word.

The counters are gorgeous, and the oven is so big Erica could crawl inside it with room to move around. Which is probably not something Foggy should say when the court evaluator comes around to check things out before his guardianship is finalized.

He never could have dreamed of affording this place when he worked at Nelson and Murdock. As far as Foggy’s quality of life is concerned, HC&B is leagues ahead of his old gig. They even offer on-site daycare for all employees.

Well, for their kids. Otherwise that would be weird.

And if there are ways in which working for HC&B is _less_ rewarding, Foggy tries not to think about them. Most of the time, it works.

“I just don’t understand why you’d take on a kid with the kind of prospects you have at HC&B,” Marci is saying.

“Because he misses Matt,” says Erica from the floor behind the couch where she’s playing with the huge box of Lego Chain Reactions Foggy got her, an impulse buy that the soles of his feet are already regretting _so hard_.

Because _of course_ she’s been listening. Christ. It’s a good thing Foggy’s never had a truly bad word to say about her, otherwise he might worry about giving her some kind of complex.

Erica stands up on her knees to add some admittedly very cool spiraling ramps to the Rube Goldberg machine she’s making and says, “I’m his rebound.”

What the hell. “You’re _seven._ How do you even know what a rebound _is?_ ”

She sits back down on her heels and looks at Foggy like she can’t believe he’s this out of touch. “We had a TV. And a radio.”

She concentrates very hard on getting the windmill bit to spin right and Foggy narrows his eyes at her. “You learned it from Candace, didn’t you.”

“I plead the Fifth, counselor.”

Foggy gives her a look. She grins.

“I leaned _that_ from you.”

Foggy rolls his eyes.

“I like her,” says Marci, grinning like a shark.

“Good,” says Foggy, “you can have her.”

At Marci’s raised eyebrow, he sighs. He glances over at Erica, who has crawled over to work on the other side of her little invention, the top of her head all he can see over the back of the couch. At lunch today, she’d started crying over the casserole Foggy had cooked for them, an old recipe of his mom’s.

Apparently, Lori made it every Friday.

Foggy leans in toward Marci. Much more quietly, he says, “She’s family, Marce.”

“I know.” Marci looks at him for a second, a look he recognizes from his mom, from Maura and Angela and Lori, like she has no idea what she’s going to do with him. Only now there’s something sad about it, something that makes Foggy _ache_. She sighs. “You know whatever this was is over between us. I don’t do kids.”

“Yeah,” Foggy says sadly, “I figured.” Marci’s good with kids because she’s good with people, but that doesn’t mean she likes them.

For a moment they just sit there, both of them looking down into their drinks like that’ll help anything. Eventually, Marci shakes out her hair and takes a sip.

Foggy’s always loved the way her hair falls around her shoulders. He may have just lost the tacit permission to push his hands through it, to feel it cascading through his fingers and over his palms, but he can still watch the way it moves, how the light flows across it.

Marci swirls the wine in her glass and smiles at him. It’s a tiny bit crooked, in a way she never really lets people see, and something settles inside him. They’ve always been fluid, evolving. This is just a shuffle-step to the left.

“It would have happened anyway, eventually,” she says. “You always knew you wanted kids someday.”

Foggy huffs into his drink. “Yeah, well, someone to raise them with always featured pretty heavily in my future family plans. And maybe, you know. An actual _plan_.”

Marci shrugs and lifts her glass to her lips. “C’est la vie.”

“Yeah, well _la vie_ can suck my—” Foggy slaps a hand over his mouth and glances at Erica out of the corner of his eye, but she’s absorbed in her Legos, snapping another block into place while she talks quietly to herself.

Marci smirks and takes a delicate sip, like she’s trying to model classiness for his benefit. Or maybe rub it in his face. In a very classy way.

When Marci leaves Foggy sets their wine glasses in the sink and puts a movie on for Erica. He lets her keep the Rube Goldberg machine in one piece as long as she shoves it up against the back of the couch where it’s out of the way and picks up all the unused blocks. Only one Lego gets stuck in the bottom of his foot when he goes to grab his work things, which Foggy decides to count as a victory. Settling into a chair at the kitchen table, he opens his briefcase and sets up his computer to start work on his next case.

He ends up watching most of _The Rescuers_ instead.

In his defense, it’s a really good movie. He’s sure that would hold up in court. When it’s over, he sends Erica to brush her teeth while he rinses out the wineglasses and puts his laptop away.

While Erica’s getting ready for bed, he decides they have to have a _conversation_.

He waits until she’s brushed her teeth and changed into her pajamas before he sits her down on the bed.

Foggy sits down next to her. He takes a breath.

“You know I love having you here, right?” he asks gently.

Erica shrugs a little, which. Kind of makes his heart hurt. “You’re still so sad.” She looks up at him, her mouth all twisted up the way his chest suddenly feels. “I don’t think I’m a very good rebound.”

Oh.

So that’s a _thing_.

“You’re not a rebound,” Foggy says, trying to sound patient instead of gut-punched. “I want you here because I love you, okay?” Lately Foggy’s found that telling the truth sometimes feels like pulling his own guts out hand-over-hand, but this is one truth that comes so easily. “You’re like the Annie to my Oliver Warbucks. Except I get to keep my hair, and we don’t break out into elaborate dance numbers.”

“I know you love me,” says Erica. She stares down at her fingers while she picks at the comforter. “But you miss Matt.”

And now they’re back to the gut-pulling. “I—yeah. I do. I do miss Matt. But I miss your mom, too.” He sighs. “Some things just can’t be fixed.”

Erica looks up at him. “Because he’s not coming back.”

“That’s right,” says Foggy softly. “But you and me, we’re gonna be fine.”

She kind of face-plants into his sternum when she hugs him, her little fists bunching his shirt awkwardly against his sides. Overall, it’s pretty uncomfortable.

He leans down until his cheek brushes the top of her head. It’s maybe the best hug he’s ever had.

***

So Erica has kind of a big problem.

Literally. It is a problem of size.

A lot of Erica’s things are in Evidence, so Uncle Foggy brought her to buy school supplies, which Mom usually does so it was kind of terrible. Uncle Foggy didn’t know what he was doing and Erica kept trying not to cry every time she turned around to beg Mom for a Black Widow notebook or a pack of sticky notes shaped like Captain America’s shield only to remember that Mom wasn’t there. Her throat felt achy and swelled up all day, like she tried to swallow the universe and the universe got stuck in her throat.

At the end of the day, they went back to Uncle Foggy’s nice new apartment with a bunch of Avengers-themed folders and pencils that she didn’t actually need, a new pencil case that looks like a wiener dog, and a brand new backpack.

After she brushed her teeth this morning, she dragged her dad’s cardboard box out from its hiding place under her bed. Now the box is sitting on the floor by her knee, her Mom’s prom dress set aside on the bed, and she’s frowning down at the broken pieces of metal and plastic at the bottom.

The smiley face backpack she and Uncle Foggy picked out is cute and round and yellow and she loves it, because it reminds her of Uncle Foggy, who is also cute and round, but not yellow.

It’s also way too small to fit all the pieces of the helmet along with her school things.

“Come on, Erica, we’re running late! Don’t make me drag you out of there!”

“Coming!” She shoves the biggest piece of the helmet under her lunchbox and bumps the cardboard box under the bed with her knee while she stands. All the other pieces rattle around in there, and she almost forgets to stick Mom’s prom dress back on top, craning down to reach under the bed.

When she stands back up her sweater is slipping down around her waist so she pulls the sleeves tighter. It’s red, and the buttons are shaped like little anchors. She got it with Mom last winter when they took all her warm clothes out of the closet and realized she’d grown out of everything.

She likes tying it this way. It looks like it’s hugging her.

“Eri _ca!_ ” says Uncle Foggy, and she rolls her eyes. She swings her backpack on and jogs out of her room to where he’s waiting at the apartment door.

He waits a little longer while she stomps into her shoes and bends down to pull the backs out from under her heels. Then they’re out the door and heading down the stairs even though Uncle Foggy hates them, because elevators kind of freak her out, now. Being trapped in a box while it’s slowly lowered down makes her eyes and her throat feel hot, like she’s going to puke, or cry, or cry so hard she pukes.

They take the train to Uncle Foggy’s work, a big glass building you can see little people walking around in all the way up to the top, like ants in an ant farm. She and Uncle Foggy walk from there to her new school, which is right around the corner.

When they get to her classroom some of the kids are already sitting at the low round tables around the room but a lot are still in the cubby corner saying goodbye to their parents and grandparents and Uncle Foggys. Uncle Foggy crouches down in front of her after she hangs up her jacket in the cubby with her name on it. “Okay, so you know the route?” he asks.

“Yep.”

“And you’re sure you’re comfortable with this. You’re not just saying that. Because I can totally hire you a body guard, or like, bring you to work with me. You don’t _have_ to go to school, right?”

She gives him a look like he’s ridiculous, because he is. “Uncle Foggy, it’s two blocks.”

“I know, I know. That’s why we picked it,” he says. “Okay, next question. This is the bonus round, so get ready. What do you do if someone’s creeping you out?”

“Call you on the phone and make sure they can see I’m doing it,” says Erica, bobbing her head from side to side with the words because she _knows_.

“You have the phone?”

Erica makes a big blustery noise and slumps down like her arms weigh forty million pounds. “ _Yes_.”

Uncle Foggy bops her on the nose. “And what do you do if someone tries to grab you?”

“I _kick_ them,” she says happily, standing up straight again and grabbing the straps of her backpack, “and scream, and try to make eye contact with the other people around.”

“ _Very aggressive_ eye contact. People are more likely to help you if they feel like you’re singling them out, so single them out _hard_. You gotta say ‘hey, you! help!’ Except with your _eyes_. And also your mouth, if the kidnapper’s not covering it.”

Erica rolls her eyes as she shrugs off her backpack. “I know that. I’ll be fine, Uncle Foggy.”

Uncle Foggy takes the backpack and hangs it up for her. “How about if you get lost.”

She gives him a _deeply unimpressed_ look. “I can see it from here.”

“Okay, okay,” says Uncle Foggy, “the Fog train is leaving the station. C’mere.” He hugs her like the red sweater, tight with his soft arms knotted around her, the best way to hold on. He falls away like the sweater too. “I’ll see you after daycare,” he says, and keeps his hands on her arms like he doesn’t want to let go.

“Bye.” Erica steps away so he won’t have to. He stands up and smiles, but his smile is kind of droopy and doesn’t want to stay up by itself, like her sweater when she’s not wearing it. She smiles at him, wide and gummy, because he’s terrible at not smiling back. His smile perks up like he found one that fits and he’s putting it all the way on.

He’s not the last grownup left, and he weaves through other crouching people and their kids on his way to the door.

He spins back around before he crosses into the hallway. “And don’t cross the street!”

“Uncle _Foggy_ ,” says Erica, and he lifts up his hands.

“All right, all right, I’m going.” And he does.

School is normal, which is terrible, because Erica expected New York City school to be at least a _little_ cooler. Also, she can’t stop thinking of the big chunk of metal sitting in the bottom of her backpack.

On her way to daycare in Uncle Foggy’s work building, she dumps the shard of helmet into a trashcan by the music store.

She walks the whole two blocks without getting kidnapped or murdered or run over by a car, but she keeps the phone in her front pocket the whole time just in case.

When daycare is over, Erica comes up to collect Uncle Foggy at the end of the day. As she walks through to his office, Uncle Foggy’s PA smiles at Erica from behind her desk where she’s packing up to go home.

Uncle Foggy’s floor is very high up and super clean and Marci is there. It’s really nice but also kind of scary, with windows that go all the way from the floor to the ceiling and barely reflect the inside lights, like they’re not even there at all. Marci prowls around her office like a shark at an aquarium, trapped but happy in its tank knowing the fish can’t get away.

Marci’s door is open. Uncle Foggy’s isn’t.

When Marci sees Erica coming she smiles. It’s her Uncle-Foggy-smile, not her shark smile or her fake shiny one that no one seems to notice isn’t real. It’s Erica’s favorite. “Love the backpack,” Marci says. “Very nineties chic.”

“Thanks,” says Erica, even though she’s not sure how she feels about being compared to a ninety-year-old sheikh. “Me and Uncle Foggy picked it out. Is he almost done?”

Before Marci can answer Uncle Foggy sticks his head out of his office. “Erica?” He spots her and smiles, says “Hey, I’ll be out in a sec,” and pops his head back in.

Marci lets Erica sit on the edge of her desk while she waits, and play with some of the little dinosaurs she stole out of Uncle Foggy’s desk drawer in what she calls “confiscating” and “an attempt to make him seem like he’s not the third least professional lawyer in New York.”

“Does he need to be hotter?” Erica asks, looking up from where the Tyrannosaurus Rex is getting beat up by a bright red dinosaur with two horns like Daredevil. The Tyrannosaurus was embezzling funds. She’s not sure what embezzling is but it sounds loud and maybe like it has something to do with electrocution.

“What?” asks Marci. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

“Mikey said to be more professional you need more degrees.”

Marci puts her hand over her mouth for a minute. Then she takes it away and smiles her Uncle-Foggy-smile again and says, “That’s a different kind of degree, a college degree. It’s a piece of paper that proves you went to enough school to become a lawyer. Or a doctor or whatever.”

“Oh,” says Erica. She thinks about it for a second. “Why didn’t they just make a new word?”

“That,” says Marci, “is an excellent question.” Erica beams at her. Uncle Foggy says Marci is very hard to impress. He also says she doesn’t like kids in general because she doesn’t like people in general, but she likes Uncle Foggy, and she likes Erica too. She said so last time she came to visit.

Daredino goes back to beating up the embezzling T-Rex, then moves on to take the drunk-driving stegosaurus until Uncle Foggy comes out of his office. He switches his briefcase to the other hand so he can help Erica jump off the desk. She puts Daredino down where her butt used to be and bends down to look him in the eyes. “I’ll come back,” she whispers. “I won’t leave you all alone.” She tugs the red sweater tighter around her waist.

“Why don’t you take him home,” Marci suggests. “I bet he’ll be happier there. My desk drawer isn’t exactly the Ritz.”

Erica picks up Daredino and tells Marci, very solemnly, “You have the most degrees.” Marci laughs.

They take the elevator because there are a million stairs and Erica would rather be stuck in a box going down than have her legs fall off. She squeezes Daredino tight in her fist the whole way to the ground. When they get out the door Erica can just barely see Marci up in her office from the street. She waves. Marci waves back.

On the subway home Erica asks Uncle Foggy why Marci thinks her backpack makes her look like a sheikh and he doesn’t stop laughing long enough to answer for three whole minutes.

***

“You better not be dying,” Foggy says, and it echoes the way all voices do over the phone, vibrating with the metal and plastic of the speaker. Foggy’s never been one for hellos or how are yous, not with Matt. Not when he could jump straight to the things that really mattered, right back where they left off because their conversations were never really over, only put on pause.

Foggy still skips the pleasantries but it’s different now. Like a proper greeting takes too much energy. Sometimes, Matt worries that now Foggy doesn’t ask how he is because Foggy’s stopped caring.

But Matt can’t think about that right now. He called for a reason.

“Why does your mom think I’m an alcoholic?”

There’s a long beat of silence over the line, then Foggy says, “ _Oh_. She was dumping _your_ scotch into the plant. That whole scene makes a lot more sense now.” Something happens just beyond the range of what the speakers can pick up, and Matt hears Foggy stumble a little. “ _Son_ of a—hold on.” His voice goes muffled and distant, like he’s holding the phone against his chest. “Erica, come pick up your Legos!”

Little feet stomp against the floor on Foggy’s end, and then Erica’s voice comes into range. “Is that Matt?” The words start out louder and recede as she crouches to grab what must be the blocks Foggy stepped on.

“Yeah, babe,” says Foggy, distracted. “Don’t leave them in the kitchen again, okay?” She must nod, because when Foggy speaks again his voice comes clear into the speaker. “Sorry,” he tells Matt. He doesn’t really sound it.

“Why’s he calling?” Erica asks, voice strong across the line.

The phone slides against the fabric of Foggy’s shirt. “Erica,” he says, muffled once again. “I’m on the phone.” She says something else, indistinct. “Yeah, I—we can talk later. Yeah. Go ahead and put those away.”

Foggy sighs and lifts the phone to his mouth, turning his attention back to Matt.

His voice buzzes around the edges with static. “So what do you expect me to do?”

Matt growls, loud enough for Foggy to hear through the phone. “She started talking about _the Curse of the Irish!_ ” says Matt, and Foggy makes a quick, cut-off sound.

Silence. Then Foggy says, “… My mom told you you have a small dick?” He sounds a little choked, and Matt can’t tell whether it’s horror or laughter. Likely both.

“I—No. She was talking about when you drink too much and you can’t…” He makes a crude motion he knows Foggy can’t see.

In his apartment across town, Foggy bursts out laughing.

Matt feels his face go hot. “It’s not funny, Foggy!” he says as the sink starts to run on Foggy’s end. “Your mom thinks I’m an _alcoholic!_ ”

Foggy’s laughter cuts off abruptly along with the faucet. It’s what Matt asked for, but the silence presses hard like a thumb into a bruise.

There’s a splash in the background, and Matt can imagine Foggy hunched in rigid lines over the sink with his sleeves rolled up, frowning into the phone tucked between his shoulder and his cheek. Not the way he looks but the way he _feels_ , radiating unhappiness, telegraphing his emotions with every word and every movement.

“Well,” Foggy says, and Matt hears the dish he’s washing clank against the bottom of the sink, “I’m sorry that I _talk to my mom about my life_ , Matthew. I apologize if that’s inconvenient for you. It’s not like I have a best friend I can talk to these days.”

“You could,” Matt says, frowning at nothing.

Matt hears the rasp of a towel as Foggy dries his hands. He can tell by the falling drops that Foggy’s not finished, dishes still piled in the sink.

The resonance of Foggy’s voice changes when he switches the phone to his hand, no longer filtered through the bones of his face.

“Now I _know_ that’s not an accusation towards _me_ ,” he says, enunciating every word.

Matt swallows and stares in the relative direction of his fridge, bright with the sound of its humming. “You left, Foggy.”

Foggy’s hand lands against the counter, a soft slap against real granite. “Don’t try to play the injured party here, counselor. We both know I was pushed.”

Matt’s refrigerator clanks as it adjusts, the heat of the machinery and the cold of the interior stirring up a swirling convection current, and Matt can feel the change in the air. The heat rises and the cold rushes in to take its place, both flowing gracefully in opposition, like a choreographed fight.

“What, nothing to say?” asks Foggy, aggressive in a way he’s never really been before, even after he first found out. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

He hangs up. The line clicks like a cut thread.

Matt slumps down into his couch like that thread was the only thing holding him up.

He sets his phone down on his bedside table with a quick, clean snap, deliberate. So far, he’s managed to stop himself leaving a string of desperate messages on Foggy’s phone. He’d like to keep it that way.

Matt can admit now that he may have miscalculated. He feels like a sailor lost at sea, all the stars fallen out of the sky and into the dark waters rolling around him, sinking until they’ve disappeared, their light swallowed down into the deep. Elektra’s dead. Karen and Foggy are gone, and so is Stick. Frank’s in the wind. Matt hasn’t taken on any clients since Foggy walked out.

Without their light to navigate by, he’s left alone to drift. The Devil is all he has left.

That’s fitting, really. After all, Satan was once called Lucifer: the brightest star of all, the most beautiful angel, and now his brightness and his beauty shine falsely like a will-o-the-wisp leading travellers off the path of the righteous.

Matt sits on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands until it’s time to let the Devil out into the night.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lent is attempted, to varying levels of success.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the comics, Foggy’s family is Episcopalian, but here he’s a lapsed Catholic because reasons.

Erica leans down from where she’s sitting cross-legged at the edge of her mattress to shove her dad’s old cardboard box back under the bed. She zips up her smiley face backpack around her books, her wiener dog pencil case, her lunchbox, and the last two pieces of the space helmet.

It broke into exactly thirty-seven pieces. Every day since then she’s been smuggling them into her backpack along with all of her school things. She knows Uncle Foggy would see if she dumped it all in the garbage in the kitchen, or notice if she always dawdled in the same spot on their walk, so she brings it with her piece by piece and drops each one in a different random trashcan or dumpster on her way to school.

She doesn’t believe dead people are watching her like Matt, but she doesn’t want Uncle Foggy to know she broke the only thing she has left of her dad besides his old toys and the stories Vovó told her.

Erica knows Vovó’s stories are true, because Vovó would never lie to her, but the boy from those stories is brave and funny and _good._ Brave, funny, good people don’t walk out on their wives and baby daughters. But even after everything, Vovó still loves him. If Uncle Foggy knew Erica broke her dad’s helmet, Vovó might find out and be sad. She might think Erica did it on purpose. Erica’s dad was Vovó’s son but she knows Erica’s mad at him. Vovó’s mad at him, too. He left them both behind.

Erica doesn’t really want to think about her dad right now. Or ever. She doesn’t know him and she never did.

When everything’s zipped safely up in the bag, Erica unfolds her pretzel legs and slides off the bed. She grabs her red sweater where it’s flung over the backrest of her desk chair and wraps the arms around her waist, tying them up and pulling them tight. Her backpack is sitting on the bed smiling up at her, and she hugs it a little when she picks it up.

The two helmet pieces are both metal, and she can hear them scraping together. Frowning, she sets the smiley face back on her bed and opens him up. She looks down at the jumble of things inside, her spare clothes and her folders and her reading book and her lunch box with the two chunks of metal tucked underneath. Then she grabs those and sticks the pieces on either side of her wiener dog. He looks like the mini hotdogs Uncle Foggy makes in the oven, and the pieces of metal kind of curve on his sides like the little crusts wrapped around them.

His name is Pig.

Her fix-it works. The backpack bounces quietly against her back as she hops out to where Uncle Foggy’s standing by the door doing up his cuffs. He looks up at her and frowns a little while she pulls on her boots, standing on one foot then the other. She kind of falls into him when she starts to tip, and he lets her stay like that until she gets them on and uses him to push herself back up straight.

He opens his mouth a tiny bit, like he’s thinking about saying something. He closes it, then opens it again.

“Hey, uh, maybe you should… not wear the same sweater every day, buddy.”

Erica grabs the sleeves where they hang down and holds on so hard she pulls them tighter without really meaning to. She looks down at the sweater for a second and pets it a little, the arms soft against the scratchy legs of her jeans. She sticks up her chin and meets Uncle Foggy’s eyes. “I’m gonna wear it.”

Uncle Foggy’s mouth twists like he might say more, but instead he just sighs. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds kind of like a question, but Erica keeps her chin up and he turns to open the door.

When they get to the stairs, Uncle Foggy walks evenly down while Erica tromps along beside him in her boots, chattering about the pinch-pot she’s making in art and jumping the last step every time they get to a landing. Her shoes smack the tiles and the sound echoes all the way up.

On the train she stands under Uncle Foggy’s arm, his hand above hers on the pole and his body boxing her in so no one jostles her. Her backpack is tucked safe in the warm space between her back and his belly. She looks up to make sure he’s not watching, then shrugs out of one strap and lets the bag slide down her other arm, grabbing the strap when it gets to her hand.

She lets go of the pole to bring the smiley face up to her chest and unzip him, then starts to root around inside.

The train lurches, and Erica falls back.

Into Uncle Foggy.

“What are you doing?” Uncle Foggy asks, sharp, grabbing her shoulder to keep her steady.

“Nothing,” Erica says quickly, zipping up the backpack and tucking the helmet pieces into the arm of her sweater like it’s a tool belt.

“You could have flown forward into the pole and bashed your head in!” Uncle Foggy says. He grabs the backpack out of her hands and slings it over his own shoulder.

The smiley face hits his head against Uncle Foggy’s back hard. Erica thinks his smile looks a little strained now, but that might be because Pig is pushed right up behind his face.

Uncle Foggy’s hand closes around her wrist and he guides her hand back to the pole. “ _Hold on_. Christ.”

Erica makes a face and grabs on. She keeps her other hand pressed flat over the helmet pieces against her waist so they don’t fall.

Some subway stations don’t have trashcans anymore but the one they’re going to does. When they get off Erica tries to ponder over toward the bin in between two pillars on their way to the stairs. Uncle Foggy lists along with her, matching Erica like he always does.

She slips the two metal bits of helmet out from under her sweater sleeve and pauses by the trashcan to dump them in.

“What the hell was that?” Uncle Foggy asks, and Erica jumps.

She looks back to see Uncle Foggy stopped beside the trashcan.

He tugs her back. “Was that a piece of _metal_ , Erica, where did you _get_ that?”

Erica stares up at him. “I found it.”

“You picked it up off the _ground_? You can’t _do_ that Erica, the ground in this city is _filthy_. Here, let me see your hands, did you cut yourself?” He grabs her wrists and turns them up, so he can examine her palms. “Seriously, who sees some big, jagged shard of metal on the ground, _in New York City,_ and thinks, ‘oh, hey, I’m gonna pick this up!’ Are you _trying_ to get tetanus?”

“No,” she whispers. Uncle Foggy looks up from her hands and into her face. His mouth twists all up like the sad little worms stranded on the sidewalk after it rains.

“Aw, c’mere,” he says, pulling her in. “I’m sorry. But you’re worrying me. You’ve been acting really weird today. Is it what I said about your sweater?”

Erica doesn’t answer. She stares down at her feet instead.

Uncle Foggy sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “You can wear it as much as you want. I just,” his hand passes over her head. “I know how kids can be mean.”

Erica shrugs. Uncle Foggy just looks at her for a second, then sighs again and turns toward the stairs.

“Come on,” he says. “We don’t wanna be late.”

They don’t talk at all as they walk to the school, but halfway there Erica grabs his hand and holds on until they reach her classroom.

Before he leaves her in the cubby corner, Uncle Foggy hugs Erica extra hard and presses their cheeks together. She presses back. He says, “Have a good day,” and puts his hand on the side of her face before he goes.

Erica goes over to sit with Mikey at one of the round tables.

“Hey, Erica,” says Mikey.

“Hi Mikey.”

Mikey is smart. He knows a lot of big words and probably five million cool facts about dinosaurs. Or more. Probably the number of facts he knows about dinosaurs is the same as the number of years dinosaurs existed.

Mikey’s dad is dead like Erica’s mom. They _understand_ each other.

They play together during recess like they always do, getting out Erica’s pencil case for The Grand Adventures of Pig the Wiener Dog, and at lunchtime Mikey trades his Cheetos for Erica’s sour cream and onion chips.

“Don’t you usually have M&Ms?” he asks, dangling his Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup by the corner of its bright orange wrapper, ready to trade.

Erica makes a face. “I gave up chocolate for Lent,” she says mournfully.

Mikey holds up the empty bag of sour cream and onion Lays and grins. “I gave up chips.”

Erica laughs.

Overall, it’s a pretty good day.

It gets even better when she heads over to the ant farm for daycare and Uncle Foggy meets her at the door. She starts to slip past him and he puts a hand on her shoulder. “Whoa, there. Where do you think you’re going?”

Erica tips her head to the side. “Daycare,” she says, but it tilts up at the end like a question.

“Well do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around, ‘cause today we’re going off-road,” says Uncle Foggy, and drags her over to the mouth of the subway.

They take the train to a building that’s pretty close to Uncle Foggy’s old apartment and the place where he used to work with Matt. They wait on the front steps to get buzzed in, and on the second floor an old woman with curly white hair opens the door for them.

“Right on time,” she says, smiling at Uncle Foggy, then turning it on Erica, too.

“Always,” says Uncle Foggy, which is a big fat lie.

The old woman seems to think so too, because one of her eyebrows goes up a little along with the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t say anything about it, though, just, “I hear you’re moving on up, Mr. Nelson.” She steps back to let them in and Uncle Foggy tugs Erica’s hand. “Not going to go full _Jeffersons_ on us, are you?”

They toe off their shoes and shed their coats by the door, Erica copying Uncle Foggy. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Bryce,” he says, “I may be up in the big leagues, with a _de_ -luxe apartment in the sky, but the East Side will never have me.” Erica doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, but she follows him into the living room when he goes.

And stops still-as-a-statue in the doorway, staring.

The room is small and kind of broken, the paint chipping on the walls and the floors all wavey the way wood sometimes gets in the water or the cold. It’s not a nice apartment, maybe even worse than Uncle Foggy’s old one with the chainsaw fridge, but in the corner of the living room sits the prettiest piano Erica has ever seen.

“That’s what I like to hear.” Mrs. Bryce pauses for a second, then says, lightly but with something else hiding underneath, “I also hear Mr. Murdock didn’t follow you. And it doesn’t seem like he’s working at the old practice.”

There’s a weird silence that follows that, but Erica isn’t paying attention as she slowly approaches the piano.

“Yeah, well,” says Uncle Foggy, which sounds like the start of something, but he doesn’t say anything else.

“Yes?”

“Matt can do what he wants,” Uncle Foggy says, in the same way he tells Erica to stop making noise when he’s working, like he’s mad and trying not to show it.

When Erica looks over at them, Mrs. Bryce is giving Uncle Foggy a long look. Then she smiles. “I’ve been told you have a little one now, and she’s quite the piano player.” She turns her smile on Erica, reaching over to prop up the piano cover. “Go ahead, honey. Show me what you can do.”

***

On Saturday, Foggy gets them breakfast from Amy’s Bread in the theater district. They’re pretty much the best bagels around, so honestly he expected her to be a little bit more appreciative.

“Is that a _bagel?”_ she asks, sounding _scandalized_ , which, what the hell. Foggy didn’t know anyone could make a breakfast food sound like an act of warfare.

“Um. Yeah?” he says slowly. “Don’t worry, I got one for you too,” and he shakes the paper bag in her direction.

She throws her hands up in the air like a total drama queen. “ _You gave up bagels!_ ”

Whoops. Foggy makes a face. But really, that kind of volume is totally unnecessary this early in the morning, especially on a weekend. “What are you,” he asks, “the Lent police?”

Erica frowns at him across the table. “Uncle Foggy you cheated!”

This should probably make him feel guilty enough to try harder, but unlike Matt, Foggy’s not in the business of punishing himself. “Aw, come on, can’t you give me just a _little_ break, Erica? I haven’t done Lent in fifteen years! It was kind of inevitable I’d mess up, I’m rusty.”

She huffs. “Well you shoulda thought of that before you missed Lent fifteen years in a row.”

“Oh please, you and your mom were the last Nelsons who still did it, and that’s only because your avó calls every year to ask what you’re giving up.” He also knows for a fact Lori cheated, but Foggy’s not going to speak ill of the dead right after he broke his bagel fast. He might be lapsed, but he was raised Catholic. Two sins in as many minutes may just be enough to drive him into a Confessional for the first time in over a decade, and that’s really not somewhere he wants to be at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning.

“Vovó’s just looking after my spiritual health,” Erica says primly, and Foggy rolls his eyes. “Besides, you’re just mad she asked _you_ what you’re giving up, too.”

Foggy knew he should have said Brussels sprouts. Then again, Cláudia would probably see through that just as easily as Foggy’s mom always did. Foggy can’t lie even over the phone.

“You’re a _heathen_ ,” Erica says, grinning.

“Wait, whoa, whoa, what was that you just said?” Foggy asks, cupping a hand around his ear. “I’m pretty sure I heard you say ‘Uncle Foggy, I want to go to church every Sunday, and maybe even weekdays too!’”

“What?” Erica asks, looking alarmed. Foggy has to bite down on his grin.

Instead, he exaggerates a confused face. “Wait, is that not what you said? Really? Because I could have sworn…”

“No! I never said that!”

“But I thought you were concerned for your spiritual health?” Foggy asks, with the falsely earnest look he stole from Matt, then _perfected_. “Thought you wanted to get down with God. Holla at the Holy Spirit. You don’t wanna be a heathen like me.”

Erica shakes her head. “I said _Vovó_ was concerned about that. Mom said the only reason we do Lent is because it’s ‘an exercise in self-discipline and delayed graffitication,’ which she said means if you give up candy or chips for a while without cheating you’ll get _even more candy or chips_ at the end.”

Actually, that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Erica pulls her bagel out of the paper bag and looks down at it thoughtfully. “I’m not sure what graffiti has to do with Lent…”

“Pretty sure it’s gratification,” says Foggy. “Which is like, satisfaction. Delayed satisfaction. Or something. I definitely took psych in college, can’t you tell? I was even awake for most of that lecture. Decreasing delay discounting of a reward, cognitive strategies for deferral, manipulation of contingencies. Something about marshmallows.”

Erica looks at him flatly over her bagel. “You never slept in class. Stop pretending you aren’t a nerd.”

Foggy shrugs, then takes another big bite and talks through it, as grossly a he possible can. “Well clearly none of it paid off.” He waves the bagel at her for emphasis, and Erica pulls a hilariously disgusted face. Foggy laughs at her. “Hold off on calling the presses, my bad self-discipline isn’t exactly news.” He swallows. “Besides, if Karen’s anything to go by, I doubt any of them are awake yet.”

Foggy spends most of the morning working. He gets less time to spend with Erica on the weekends than he would like, or than he would have before Nelson and Murdock imploded, but he has to keep both HC&B and their clients in the black. It’s a drag having to work more hours when they’re not even billable.

After lunch they connect two of the Rube Goldberg machines Erica’s been building all over the house to make one huge one that Foggy’s actually pretty proud of.

“Add architect to the list of backup careers if the law doesn’t work out for me,” he says as the ball rolls home, and Erica just stares at him.

He’s kind of disappointed Matt isn’t here, if only because he would have appreciated the joke.

He bops Erica on the nose to stop himself from thinking about it. “Didn’t you know my mom wanted me to be a butcher?”

He puts her to bed at eight o’clock, then lets her talk him into reading two extra chapters of her Nancy Drew book before he clicks on her nightlight and makes her go to sleep.

Four hours later, Foggy is sitting at the table reading over the evidence from the prosecution and Hogarth’s attached notes when he hears a knock from the window. He jumps about a foot out of his chair, knocks his empty beer over onto the floor where it clatters around like a metalworks factory, and stomps across the room to shove the window open.

He doesn’t stop swearing the whole time.

“… of a fucking dickwad _asshole_ ,” he says as he wrenches the screen out of the way.

“Hello to you too,” says Matt.

“ _Don’t_ ,” says Foggy.

Matt shrinks back a little, his stupid horns disappearing into shadow. His mouth goes all sad and crooked, but Foggy _does not care_. Matt Murdock’s stupid wounded duck face has no effect on him anymore.

That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.

“Why the fuck are you here?” he asks, angling his body as if that would stop Matt from sensing everything in his apartment.

Matt shifts, a darker shadow in the gloom. “It’s Sunday,” he says, his voice low, like he’s hoping Foggy won’t hear him. “Sundays don’t count.”

Foggy glares and crosses his arms. “Could you try and be a little more cryptic, I’ve been looking for someone to waste my time.”

Matt looks really shifty. By which Foggy means he’s literally shifting on the fire escape, like a guilty kid. Like Erica after she dropped her Lego down the back of the radiator and it melted all into the coils.

Matt grimaces. “I gave you up for Lent,” he admits.

For one incredibly weird and disorienting second, Foggy is speechless. “Well,” he says, still feeling slightly stunned, “let me get my calendar, because I have literally nothing to say to that.”

Matt takes an aborted step forward. “I know, I know it’s weird, but—”

“Yeah,” Foggy says, his arms tightening over his chest. “It’s really fucking weird. Because clearly it means there’s something to give up here, which, I was under the impression there wasn’t. I mean, what do you do, come around periodically to camp out on my fire escape?” He frees one arm to gesture wildly at the balcony where Matt’s standing.

Matt stays silent.

“Oh, my god.” Foggy presses his palm to his forehead then shoves it out in Matt’s direction like he can physically push the truth away from him. “You can’t _do_ that, Matt. Christ.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt says, even more wounded and even duckier than before, which is just fantastic. It shouldn’t work when Foggy can’t even see his _eyes_.

“You know what,” Foggy says, because he’s annoyed and resentful and sick of this shit, “I’m actually surprised you’re not skipping Lent.”

Matt’s head whips towards him, then darts away. “You know there’s only one time that ever happened,” he tells the ridiculous red leather covering his chest in a miserable voice, like his costume slapped him in the face and stole his nunchucks.

“Yeah,” says Foggy, nodding, because he _still does not care,_ “and now that you’re back with Elektra—”

“Elektra’s dead,” Matt says sharply.

That pulls Foggy up short. “I—what?”

Matt’s smile is even worse than his pout, sharp and darkly unhappy, like the smile itself is a form of self-punishment. Like it _hurts_. “Don’t you read the news?”

Foggy shakes his head. “Not the society pages,” he says helplessly. He gestures into the apartment behind him with the arm that’s still free. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

Matt nods. Then he turns away. “I’m not proud of it. Missing Lent,” he says. He’s not smiling that gallows smile anymore, thank god. “It’s just one more thing about that time that I regret.”

Foggy sighs. “Yeah, well, you did penance for the rest of the year.” He crosses his arms again, shrugs and tries to balance the unhappy tilt of his mouth. “You’ve been doing penance ever since.”

Matt’s still facing away. Foggy sighs.

“That is what this is, isn’t it? The whole… _vigilante_ thing? Or at least part of it?”

Matt doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even turn back to Foggy, so Foggy stops bothering. He has work to do. He has a whole life to get back to, a life Matt’s no longer a part of. A life Matt doesn’t _want_ to be a part of.

The edge comes back to Foggy’s voice. “So, I mean, I doubt you came here just to get your Sunday fix of spying on me, because if that was the case, clearly I still wouldn’t know about it. What do you want?”

Matt’s still wearing the face, so Foggy can’t even think about wanting to punch him without feeling like an asshole. Matt ducks his head. “I don’t want anything,” he says, voice low. “I know I… have no right to ask you for things anymore.”

Foggy’s anger sinks into a deep exhaustion, and he sighs and slumps like he’s only just noticed the weight of his bones. He rubs the side of his face. “What do you want, Matt,” he asks, too tired to hold up the end of his own question.

Matt backs even further into the shadows, like he doesn’t want Foggy to see him at all. He tips his head toward the inside of the apartment. “I—Erica. She was having a nightmare. I… heard it.”

“What?” Foggy asks, sharp, the words like a string running through him and pulling his body to attention. The anger is an acid burn in his stomach, and he doesn’t know if he’s mad at himself because he didn’t know or at Matt because he did. He wonders for a moment if this is how Matt feels all the time. Anger at what other people are doing and what he can’t do to stop it all tangled up and writhing in the pit of his stomach, underscored with some instinctive terror, like the chamber full of snakes in _Indiana Jones_ took up residence in his lower intestine.

“She was calling for her mom,” Matt says quietly.

There’s something hot crawling up Foggy’s throat. He’s going to throw up. When he opens his mouth, the snakes in his stomach are going to slither out and strangle him.

“Are you okay?” asks Matt, and his sad face has been replaced by a pinched look of concern. He leans in toward Foggy a little, like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it.

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” Foggy snaps.

For a second they just stand there on either side of the open window. Then Foggy droops and runs a heavy hand over his eyes.

“I’d better go check on her,” he says. Matt nods a little, uncertain, and hops up on the railing of the fire escape to hover there, crouched and coiled like he can’t quite make himself leave.

Another moment passes like that, Matt poised at the edge of the fire escape and both of them poised at the edge of something else, something bigger. Then Foggy moves to shut the window. He barely catches a frown beneath the helmet before Matt flips backwards off the fire escape like the fucking ninja he is. Foggy hears him sliding down the ladder, his feet slapping the cement three floors below, and says, “Thanks,” at regular volume, knowing Matt can still hear him. “And Matt?” he says, listening for the footsteps echoing up the alleyway to stop. “I’m sorry. About Elektra. I really am.”

After a moment, Matt starts up again, and Foggy waits until he can’t hear the sound of Matt’s feet anymore, and then he waits longer, until he thinks Matt probably can’t hear his, either. He goes quiet down the hall and cracks open the white door at the far end, glancing inside to see that Erica really is awake. She’s sitting up, a dark shadowy lump at the foot of the mattress.

Foggy goes into her room where she’s curled up on the bed, leaning tiredly into the wall.

He stops just inside the doorway, making sure the nightlight’s shining on his face. “Hey, buddy.”

Her head is down, and she looks up without moving anything except her eyes. All she says is, “Hi,” a tiny, miserable sound. She looks like a sad little kitten, like Matt’s sad duck but smaller. It’s like she’s begging with her eyes but Foggy has no idea what for.

Foggy comes forward to sit on the far side of the bed. “You want a glass of water?” he asks, and she shakes her head. “An extra pillow?” Another shake. “The rare horn of an extinct rhinoceros? I’ve always wanted to break into the Museum of Natural History. Oh, I have one of those rice bags you stick in the microwave to keep your feet warm, I can nuke it for you.”

“No.” She turns her eyes back down and shrinks even smaller into herself.

Foggy scoots closer and nudges her with his arm so she’ll look at him. “Want some chocolate?” he asks in a whisper like a secret between them, even though no one else is there to hear. She ducks her head and smiles reluctantly.

“That’s cheating,” she whispers.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell,” Foggy says, smiling down at her. “Besides, it’s after midnight. Everyone knows Sundays don’t count.”

Her lips twitch up a little, and Foggy grins as he herds her out of bed and into the kitchen. She shuffles next to him when he turns to open the high cabinet, so he hoists her onto the counter while he grabs the chocolate and she kicks the low cupboard with her heels. The thump of her feet follows a rhythm that seems vaguely familiar.

Foggy hops up on the counter next to her and hands her a square of the good sixty percent chocolate he saves for special occasions, then breaks one off for himself. She eats that and then two more after, and when she’s done Foggy licks his thumb and scrubs the chocolate off her face like his mom used to do for him. She fusses and tries to squirm away, but she’s smiling, and when she licks his arm in retaliation Foggy squawks loudly and earns himself her first laugh of the night.

“You know if you have nightmares you can always come get me,” Foggy says quietly as he’s tucking her back into bed.

“I know,” she whispers, snuggling down under the blanket.

“But you might have to jump on me or something,” Foggy adds, “I’m kind of a heavy sleeper.”

Erica blinks up at him. “I love you Uncle Foggy.”

Foggy rests his hand on her forehead. Her skull feels tiny and fragile under his palm, like a robin’s egg. He wishes he could keep her cupped safe in his hand forever. “I love you too.”

***

Matt hears Erica calling for Lori in her sleep five more times in the next two weeks, but by the time Matt drops down onto Foggy’s fire escape he’s already in her room calming her down, reading a chapter of Nancy Drew out loud, doing all the different voices and hamming it up for the funny parts, or plugging his phone into a speaker so he can play soft songs for her and once, memorably, an eight-minute YouTube recording of whale noises.

Matt always knew Foggy would be a great dad, if anyone gave him half the chance.

This Lent, Matt’s fast isn’t going very well. He doesn’t mean to keep running into them, or at least he doesn’t think he does, but it happens anyway, again and again over the next month. They don’t even know when it happens, Matt stopping cold on the rooftop or street corner where he’s standing as soon as he hears Foggy’s familiar heartbeat or the barely-there lisp in Erica’s Ss coming from blocks away.

The first time it happens Erica’s telling Foggy a story about someone named Mikey and a pig. She talks about them as though Mikey and the pig are both real people she knows, which Matt thinks is probably true of Mikey but maybe not of the pig, even if she seems to believe it. Her heartbeat doesn’t waver, though it does slow down and speed up with the movement of her feet. She’s skipping when she comes into range but stops after about two blocks as she gets to the exciting part. When the story’s finished she starts up again until Matt can’t hear them anymore.

The second time, they’re at the grocery store. Matt only ever gets his produce in person, because it can get bruised during delivery and because Matt is maybe a little bit of a food snob. He’s checking a tomato for soft spots when he hears them winding their way through the aisles. Foggy keeps yelling at Erica for putting things into their cart when he’s not looking. Erica tries to pretend she’s not audibly hiding a laugh every time she dumps something else weird into the basket. “The next thing you put in there stays in there, and I’m making you eat it!” says Foggy when a heavy glass jar filled with something suspended in brine rattles the bars on the bottom of the cart. Erica thunks it back down on the shelf so fast it almost tips over. The things floating inside slosh and bump into each other and the sides of the jar, and the whole thing smells strongly of vinegar and salt. It must be something really disgusting. “Good choice.” Foggy might be legitimately annoyed based on the bite in his voice, but underneath that he’s hiding laughter, too. Matt stays hidden in the produce aisle until he hears the automatic doors swish closed behind them.

The next time it happens, Matt crosses the street and into range of where Foggy is standing in line at a convenience store with a plastic case of what might be disposable razors crinkling in one hand and a six-pack sloshing in the other. Erica’s small starburst of heat is shifting at his elbow while she flips through a trashy magazine off the rack at the checkout counter and talks to him, telling elaborate and very improbable stories about the lives of the people inside. Foggy’s never liked tabloids, the invasiveness of them, but he’s cracking up while Erica explains one woman’s complicated and often tragic affair with a werewolf who is allergic to humans. “That’s Kim Kardashian,” Foggy tells her through his laughter. She asks who that is, and Matt makes himself move along before Foggy has a chance to answer.

Some days, he hears just Foggy on his lunch break, sometimes with coworkers, sometimes with Karen or Marci, but most often alone. Matt sometimes thinks about plopping down across from him, stealing the crunchiest fries off his plate, and pretending nothing’s changed between them. Sometimes, he thinks about grabbing Foggy’s hand and leaving his plate to go cold on the table, dragging him away so they can talk. So they can fix things.

And then one afternoon about a week into April, he hears just Erica walking by herself a block away from HC&B. She does the same thing she did when she was walking with Foggy, skipping for a while and then slowing to a walk until she’s apparently moved by the spirit to skip once again. Forty feet behind her, a much more powerful pair of feet roughly matches that rhythm, and peels off when she gets within fifty feet of the glass double doors.

Like they were following her.

Matt slips into an alley nearby and pulls out his phone, leaning his cane against the building beside him.

Foggy answers after three rings. “What the hell, Matt, you can’t call me here, I’m at _work_ ,” he hisses down the line.

Matt shakes his head, though he knows Foggy can’t tell. “No, I know, but—”

“Are you dying?” Foggy interrupts.

Matt scratches the back of his head with his free hand. “I—no.” Someone passes by with music blaring from an old pair of earbuds, battered enough the sound comes louder from the tiny ventilation holes on the backs than from the speakers.

“Okay.” There’s a click from Foggy’s end as he sets his pen down on his desk. “Is anyone else dying?”

Matt hesitates. “No,” he admits when the silence starts to stretch, hand still on the back of his neck. It’s not silence, not really. Stick would say there’s no such thing, furious in the face of such laziness, such lack of precision, that descriptor applied to a whole city’s percussion of sound, but without Foggy’s voice it _feels_ silent.

“So you just called—what? To _chat?”_ The word sounds like a curse. “Okay. Let’s chat. I won’t ask you about Lent, because it’s not a Sunday and you're on the phone with me, so clearly that’s not going so well for you. Have you been keeping up with the Kardashians?”

Matt barely manages to stop himself from making a telling comment about Kim Kardashian’s messy lupine love affair, as narrated by Erica. “Foggy, stop, this is important—”

“Look, Matt, can you please just _listen_ for a second? Just, not talk, and listen?” He pauses, like he’s waiting for Matt to disappoint him. When Matt doesn’t speak, he breathes slow out his nose and continues. “I really don’t need this from you right now. My sister is _dead_.” His voice cracks a little, and Matt’s heart cracks in sympathy. “Now I’m raising her kid.” He pauses, lets out a strangled sound over a backdrop of one hand rustling through his hair. “I have no idea how to raise a kid. I, I didn’t even know she was having nightmares, I had to have the _local vigilante_ come tell me. And you, you can’t do this, not after everything else you’ve already done.”

Matt can hear the rasp of Foggy’s palm over his cheek. Air rushes past the receiver when he takes a deep breath.

“I’m not saying I’m blameless, here,” he says, steadier now. “And I know there was this perfect storm of shittiness converging on us, most of which was out of your control. But the things that were in your control? You really messed up. I was _in the hospital_. If our positions were reversed there is _nothing_ that could keep me from seeing you. And I can’t put myself on the line like that if you won’t do the same. You can’t run off and leave me to hold up our entire relationship alone. It’s not fair, and it’s not good for me. So please. _Please_. Unless it’s a _real emergency._ Stop calling me.”

And then he hangs up.

Matt overheard a conversation between Marci and a classmate once in college who asked her why she was dating _Foggy Nelson_ , in a tone that made Matt clench his fists against the itch in his palms. But Marci didn’t say any of the things Matt had assumed, uncharitably, that she would. She thought about it for a second, said something obnoxious about knowing she could get any guy she wanted, and then provided some details Matt hadn’t really wanted to hear about Foggy’s sexual prowess, at least not in relation to Marci.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she’d said, “he has his faults. He can be annoying, and insecure, and he has terrible taste in friends.”

At that point, Matt was considering interrupting the conversation by heading their way and “accidentally” stabbing her in the ankle with his cane.

Then she said, “But there’s something about knowing Foggy Nelson cares about you. Like if he thinks you’re worth it, you can’t really be that bad.” And that had stopped Matt in his tracks.

As many years as Matt’s known Foggy and as much as it pains him to admit it, he’s never found a better way to describe the way Foggy makes him feel.

Only now, Foggy doesn’t think he’s worth it anymore.

It’s a bit like being punched in the gut. Or shot in the head.

It’s a bit like hearing a crumpled paper bracelet hit the floor.

It’s a bit like having God place His thumb on the top of your head and crush you down into the dust of the Earth.

But it doesn’t matter. Foggy might not want to talk to him, but Erica could be in danger, and Matt’s not going to let anything happen to her. After all he’s taken from Foggy, it’s the least Matt can do.

For Erica, who lost her home and her life and her _mother,_ it’s the only thing Matt can do.


End file.
